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Have you ever woken up with your partner standing above you with a pillow in their hands and tears in their eyes? Has your partner ever given you items (laundry, books, barbells) that have disrupted your balance as you were walking down the stairs? Has your partner brought you for long walks in deserted areas with cliffs and walked ahead of you for the entire time never looking back? Has your partner ever adjusted the brakes on your car before you get to work? Have you nearly been murdered by a hitman, only to escape by the fact that he and your partner got their dates mixed up? Yes. Well, there is a consensus in the counselling community that this may be down to a failing relationship. I mean why else would your partner want you dead? You’re perfect.

All relationships go through ups, downs, and round and rounds. Some fixable, others doomed, and a third group called “what the fuck is going on here?/Doing it for the kids.” This is a grouping with people who are too lazy to split up, too financially invested to move away from each other or who realise that one day they may figure out they love each other again. (Love here being defined as a mirroring of the infant state. I learned that yesterday from a cocky baby).

What is a relationship anyway? Freud defined it a boat that carries your cousins on it, due to the questioner having a stutter. Stoics would say you should never become needy. You should never NEED another person if you love them. As you gaze across the dinner table at your partner whose knuckles are red from gripping their knife and fork, a memory is evoked of their face with pupils dilated and all that mattered was you. The realisation hits that you need to talk. You become that needy stoic hating loser, constantly questioning the validity of the situation. They eventually do a “not a-fucking-gain” arch of their eyebrows and you wander off angrily into a bottle of rum until it dawns on you that yes, you are supremely fucking annoying.

Months go by, without physical contact, sometimes, no eye contact. You discuss the kids as if locked inside the UN. The clever kids look at each other and then from one parent to the other, weighing up the merits of their eventual choice, enquiring of cousins what their parents are like JUST IN CASE. You try never to argue around the kids, but that is impossible. Kids are experts in conflict management as they have spent years observing harassed teachers slowly going mad trying to get through each day.

THE CRISIS: You can’t/won’t break up. The kids matter too much. You don’t want to fight anymore. The spark may be gone but the daily realities haven’t. What to do? Well, maybe turn to quantum mechanics and the idea of quantum superposition: The Schrödinger’s cat relationship counselling paradigm.

METHOD: Both participants walk into a room, placing a recently procured wooden box (from somewhere like Woodies, any kind of wooden box will do. Build your own if you have skills) on the floor. Face each other. Try to make direct eye contact. Take a deep breath. Open the box and mentally place your relationship inside. Before you close the box, place a divisive issue in the corner of the box. Something like the misinterpretation of a night out gone wrong or a who’s who of people who fucked up your wedding, adding weights so as not to balance to one side of the family or other. There is a 50% chance of these issues causing an explosion that will kill the relationship.

Close the box. Your relationship, which has caused so much chaos up until then, is now equal parts alive and dead. It’s in the box. If you open that box you will see exactly what state your relationship is in. Do you want to do this? Well, Einstein, do you? (Einstein retorts, “Don’t bring me in to this! I’m on the toilet”).

So, when your friend, let’s call her Debbie, comes to you and says that she is having problems with Bobbie, tell her that in order for them to have a relationship, it has to exist on many different wavelengths at the same time. However remind Debbie that they will never see wave behaviour from their relationship as it is too big an object. Also, don’t forget the main thing. Debbie is not going to get this. Debbie in particular is what scientists would call, “a thick.” Bobbie is stupider than Debbie, as Bobbie wasn’t born Bobbie, but Bobby. He thinks it’s cool to be called Bobbie. Fuck Bobbie. Bobbie is undiagnosed ‘thick.’

So, if you feel comfortable spending every waking hour with the same person for the rest of your life, yet know that there are issues that could potentially destroy everything that is good there at any moment, consider the box. The box may save you a lot of money and heartache. You will never have the respect of your children though. Children just be like that.

Like this:

As we await the end of the world, at least there’s still this. When I’m sitting in my dinner on Chrimblas Day, ready to stab a sibling with a wishbone and carefully keeping an eye on the volume of alco-liquid that will get me to bedtime, I will be humming ‘Fairytale of New York’ in my head. Best watched/listened to alone as adding one other person makes it feel like some kind of formal Irlanda ‘salute the flag’ event. If heard in a pub, it provokes a selfish reaction as you scowl at some pissed-up tit in a Chrimblas jumper, wanting to tell him, “I remember when this came out you little prick. You probably think the Killers are legends. Go to Arnotts for your Chrimblas music you dick.”

Anyways, It’s about the only thing worth looking forward to at Christmas. Everything else disappoints, except functional alcoholism. In this awkward time when people are worried about ‘other’ people saying Happy Holidays, taking the Christmas out of Christmas, worrying about a war on Christmas, just remember one thing: nobody is actually doing that. If someone says Happy Holidays to you, you can say Happy Christmas to them. They don’t care. Nobody cares. Muslims don’t care. Buddists don’t care. Evangelical Ewoks don’t care. Scientologists don’t care because they want your Pass Card. I don’t care.

There is no God. No evidence of its existence. No evidence that it doesn’t exist. No one knows. Nobody actually knows. So, if someone says Happy Christmas to you, you’ll probably go Happy Christmas back, despite you both dropping your religious education aged 12 and only go to a church for a wedding or a funeral. You say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes. That embarrassed person usually mutters ‘thanks’ through soaking hands. They don’t actually think that your ‘bless you’ means that you are an ordained priest or are a dark wizard with healing powers. Fuck that and fuck you. Giving me a cold I don’t fucking want.

I once heard Ronan Keating singing this song. He won’t be doing that again.

“Oh, why can’t i live a life for me?
Why should i take the abuse that’s served?
Why can’t they see they’re just like me?
I’m not the one that’s so absurd”
– Al Jourgensen

The demons that major religions espouse as the dealers of justice in the mythical afterworlds have their work cut out for them. The hourly event horizon that humans are going through right now will mean having a pitchfork shoved up your urethra for eternity would seem pleasant compared to an existence where lies have become a staple of public life. The lie is now reported rather than refuted. The liar is accepted. Yessssss.

The “everything I say is bullshit” paradigm that is currently being used as national policy in that social thought experiment, America, has been imported to this littul land over the past decade or two, thanks in part to Mike Murphy’s early Sunday evening travelogues in the 80s. Americans, they’re mad like! It used to be that a politician or public servant caught in a lie or corruption would resign in disgrace, but now they follow a path of being caught, pilloried, quietly moved aside, then interviewed and then they write the book. They ride out any shit-storm with the gravitas of a life-long heroin user.

Trump’s genius is the flooding of the news cycle with such insanity that media can’t even cope with a retort to the first idiotic tweet. Enter to the Irish cause, Senator Rónán Mullen, Irlanda’s least aborted Senator. Y’see, the Catholic Church collapsed into a black hole cluster fuck similar to that of the Soviet Union and lost control. Irlandese people realised that apart from the church’s sexual abuse and authoritarian control issues, there was this new issue that basically Mass is really boring. Whatever you can say about Irlandese people, they don’t like to be bored. Look at Storm Ophelia (not Ronan Keating’s sexual preference) where despite three people being tragically killed, the Irlandese tweeted at the hurricane in the same manner some Americans shot at theirs.

Anyways, Mullen paints himself as this country’s moral authority and as a Catholic man, he of course is primarily interested in women’s healthcare. The problem of course is that his methods are seen as extremely calculated or calculatedly extreme. If you are pro-life and a moderate, you have no voice in the upcoming repeal referendum. Watch your feelings be redirected through the Old Testament via post-independence Irlanda, around the skirts of a few bishops, into the tweet machine, the boring Facebook essay, the newspapers and finally on to the televisual organ of the state. You’ll feel like the kid who was chosen last for the Lacrosse team. Ha, Lacrosse. Stupid, stupid Lacrosse.

Mná na hÉireann are in for a battle over the next year. Looking at the the way old white men in America are trampling on the most basic of female health rights, it will not go unnoticed by the tiny penised old white men hiding behind the cloak of God and civil war politics. These men are always keen to tell women what they should think and do. Be more like the Virgin Mary, they say. She didn’t abort her magic baby.

There is obviously nothing wrong with being pro-life. Although to quote Bill Hicks (coz that’s what everyone endlessly does), “Why don’t you lock arms and block cemeteries?” That’s fun, right? Anyways this munki remembers the last abortion referendum and how the choices offered on the ballot paper were eternal damnation or well, eternal damnation with priests. There were more images of aborted foetuses than actual instances of Irlandese women who had abortions, leading this munki to believe that Catholic photographers were aborting babies for their “posed by model” placards. Just my theory.

The problem occurs that the idea of having a reasoned debate about this highly important issue for women has already been fucked out the window, with the baby and the bath water, if you’ll excuse the analogy. What we can look forward is a lot of shouting, and depending on the calibre of the shouter on either side, folksy folks who are on the fence will jump to the side of shouter that least annoys them. It’s a cruel way to decide this, but un-aborted people are generally fucking stupid. Look at Brexit, Trump, our Eurovision picks for the last 20 years, our last Presidential election. That election was about who was going to hardly bother the public eye for seven years. To get there you had to invade the public eye like conjunctivitis.

So, Rónán Mullen is the unchosen voice of some people I know who are pro-life. He will be dragged into studio after studio and he’ll use the Trump model to get his agenda across. Look at his comment about Savita Halappanavar where he said “If there was abortion on demand, she wouldn’t have been in the hospital because she wouldn’t have been pregnant and she wouldn’t have been having a miscarriage.” You see, he throws a stupid statement out there, leaves it hanging, gets attacked and then claims he is being attacked. He will elicit support from balls of negative energy angrily sitting in the armchairs already pissed off that we brought that Irish guy home from Egypt, when there are people dying in the streets. In the streets! Although, don’t give those homeless a euro. They’ll spend it on drugs. Wait, how much do drugs cost?

Example of a placard showing aborted foetuses. Gross

Mullen knows this, as does Trump, Farage, Le Pen etc. You can always appeal to idiots who have no capacity for researching or for most reading. Since the economic crash of 2008, fascists have learned they can re-emerge from the shit because people find it easier to blame Muslims and anyone else foreign than bankers, who are invisible in plain sight because their skin matches their shirts. If economists don’t understand how the world economy works, how will Brian from a hole in the ground in Laois or Jim from a privileged golden carriage on the head of a small poor boy in Dalkey understand the sub-prime mortgage disaster when they share a common belief that Ryan Tubridy is actually an intellectual. Anyone who likes Frank Sinatra is an intellectual, right?

They’re coming to take our jobs. They can’t even speak the language. They are terrorists. People who haven’t learned the lessons from World War 2 won’t realise that the white totems who control the little fascists want to get rid of the Africans, the Asians, the Muslims, the gays, the intellectuals (not Sinatra fans, real intellectuals), the Catholics, the Buddhists, the women etc. When they are rid of them all, well, they’re coming after you stupid white boy, aren’t they? It’s a pity there was no class in the education system that could teach kids about this kind of thing.

Anyways, back to the repeal referendum. This is a no-brainer. The health of women is of paramount importance. They should never be dictated to by ill-equipped men who believe in magic beings in the sky and have Handmaid’s Tale fantasies. Doctors should never be put in the position of not knowing whether to treat a patient who is about to die. Fuck that.

It feels like monsters surround us every day. Every knock on the door could provide trick or treat. I think Uncle Al should have the last world,

“Oh, why can’t i live a life for me?
Why should i take the abuse that’s served?
Why can’t they see they’re just like me?
I’m not the one that’s so absurd”

You want me to stare and remain impassive, right? (To self…be a vampire…be the best vampire ever…be pale)

Here’s the awesome opening segment from the wonderful “Only Lovers Left Alive.” A movie in which Tom Hiddleston’s inability to react to anything that’s going on actually helps his performance. A movie in which Tilda Swinton inability to be anything else but a vampire really helps. A movie in which John Hurt’s inability to be anything other than a sinister old man really helps. Basically no one acts.

HiddleSwinton never really caught on though.

More junkie-chic vampires please. The soundtrack to this album creates an odd listening sensation, especially walking around your daily boring, ordinary human life (That’s right, I said it. Screw you humans). You actually become pale and blink less and get pissy at Taylor Swift posters. You walk, slowly trailing a bottle of Malbec behind you sneering at passersby. Eyeing up swans as a potential food source. Only the best for you. Crouching for no reason. Looking at beautiful people as possible eternity mates. A sort of non-goth goth. Add a flouncy shirt and you’re away. Basically, you become a pretentious dick.

In the reeking darkness, I see a man silhouetted at the end of my bed wearing nothing but a pair of leather pants, a puff of smoke leaving the area where his head should be and escaping through the open window past fluttering ghostly drapes.

I rub my twitching eyes and notice I have the alcohol sweats. My head pounds and I see another shadowy figure behind the swaying man. A woman with red curly hair, her face lit by an angry moon, exhibiting a dark wet-lipped sneer. I pull the bed covers up to my face and wonder whether I should ask them a pertinent question. She begins to sway beautifully. They both move to an unheard ancient music.

My face is fully wet now and the sticky humidity has made me, I must say, breathless. Biting down hard on my knuckles, I watch them. Opening my mouth to speak, no sound comes out. I feel strangely aroused. What is this feeling? She puts her ring-ed finger to her lipstick-ed mouth. He leans in. His devilish eyes focus on me. He pours red wine into my mouth until I gag. She sits sliently at the edge of the bed. My mind is full of multiple possible scenarios, some including my demise. He moves closer awkwardly but with grace, his glistening white shoulders moving like an insect. She smokes cigarettes and blows a ring at my head. I am backed up against the headboard, pushing down on the soaked sheets. My startled eyes like something from a silent movie. He opens his wine-drenched mouth, his cigarette-stained teeth smiling at me and through his hot breath comes the sound,

“Buzz…buzz…buzz.” Over and over again.

The air around us vibrates violently. The lamp crashes to the floor. She throws the bed covers to the wall. He smashes the wine bottle above my head. Bottles fall to the ground as they close in. She climbs on top of me. I know what’s about to happen. He climbs on her back to get a spectator’s view. A bottle of whiskey rolls across the floor. He has more wine now, spilling it on my bare chest, then casting it aside after guzzling half of it. She pops champagne and necks it, the foaming spillage forming around the area of our connection.

Her eroticism and reptilian rhythmic motion…the, the, the vibrating air send me into an ecstatic thrall. She screams….He buzzes. She throws her wine glass behind her and he rubs her wet hair as she performs her devilish insane exhibition on my prone body. The light fixtures explode and the walls begin to drip with what I hope is wine and my, my, my last thought before I succumb to these unnatural, unearthly pleasures is that if I wake from this surreal carnal experience, I really must bring all this glass to the recycling centre in the golden morn.